Selling conservative ideology

One of those reminders is roaring along the East Coast of the United States this week.

Whether it goes by Frankenstorm, Superstorm or Hurricane Sandy, the late-season hurricane is bearing down on 50 million people, perhaps as far west as Chicago and the Great Lakes.

By this morning, many people could be in deep trouble, their homes, roads and workplaces flooded by torrential rains or tidal storm surges from the angry sea. Others could be dealing with snow. Lots of it. Power could be out in many places. The lights will even be out on Broadway as New York prepares for the worst.

Just to show its versatility, nature delivered an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale to Canada's Pacific coast on Monday. The epicenter was three miles deep and out at sea. And while damage was minimal and tsunamis didn't materialize, the quake was unnerving.

A movie prop was the first casualty of Hurricane Sandy in the United States. The HMS Bounty, a sailing reproduction of the original 18th century British ship whose crew mutinied and settled on remote Pitcairn Island in the Pacific Ocean, sank Sunday night off North Carolina's Cape Hatteras in a merciless stretch of sea known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Two crewmen are missing; 14 were saved by the Coast Guard. It was good government at work. Although some politicians would argue it would be cheaper to let them all die.

Not that Mitt Romney is one of those. Nobody's asked him that question specifically.

But he does favor turning the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which will help bail storm victims out of this latest natural disaster, over to the states. The very states that scream for federal help when they're in trouble and over their heads financially.

It's funny how between disasters voters forget conservatives' blind insistence on no rules, no taxes, absolute self-reliance and the superiority of states rights - though never the superiority of states' obligations to their inhabitants that extreme conservatism requires.

During the primary season's debates, Mitt Romney was asked if the federal government should shut down FEMA and turn its responsibilities over to the states.

"Absolutely," was his response."Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better."

Never mind that the private sector, with its insistence on profit and being paid, preferably up front, is disinclined to rescue poor people from rooftops, feed and clothe them, establish refugee centers and help them rebuild or relocate.

And yet conservatives won't give up their idea of destroying the social contract - the idea of one for all and all for one - that Americans have spent more than a century codifying to counter the inequities and injustices that saturate Darwinian capitalism at its worst.

Privatizing government was a big George W. Bush idea, too.

Many seem to have forgotten the image of Bush looking out the window of Air Force One on his fly past as Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and incompetence paralyzed his administration's response. Despite his take on reality and their best inclinations, churches and charities just can't handle monumental disasters.

President Bush and his sidekick, Dick Cheney - both failures in business - were nonetheless promoters of privatizing everything, including war, while exempting their tax-paid jobs. Their corporate pals made fortunes off the war in Iraq and from the failure to regulate business and banking.

But it was soldiers, most of them from modest means, who did the bleeding and the dying in Iraq.

It is ordinary taxpayers of equally modest means, half of whom apparently are amnesiacs, who are going to vote for Bush-clone Mitt Romney's vision of government of the rich, for the rich, and by the rich.

For that their punishment - and for the rest of us - will be paying the personal and communal price of conservative folly for decades to come.

But in the meantime, if Hurricane Sandy is as bad as the weather geniuses expect, FEMA and the Obama administration will be around at least for a few more months to practice its unappreciated speciality - cleaning up messes amassed by conservative ideology.

Saying the administration is preparing for the worst, President Barack Obama offered this assessment of the hurricane's implications just days from the election.

"I am not worried at this point about the effect on the election," he said in response to a question about cancelled campaign stops. "I am worried about the impact on families. I am worried about the impact on our first responders. I am worried about the impact on our economy and on transportation. The election will take care of itself next week."

And so it will.

But if conservative ideology triumphs over compassion and reason on Nov. 6, the next killer hurricane or winter storm might well require every man, woman and child to look out for themselves.

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